I’m sure by now you’ve heard that yesterday Neil Armstrong “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.” They don’t make them like him anymore.

I’ve always been fascinated by space exploration, and like so many others I’ve daydreamed about going into space. What was different about Neil Armstrong is that he did what everyone else only dreamed of doing – he truly went where no man had gone before.

I’ve been sending out some impertinent tweets about Progressive Insurance lately, but I haven’t explained how they pissed me off. So I will do that here as succinctly as possible. There’s a general understanding that says, “insurance companies— oh they’re awful,” but since Progressive turned their shit hose on my late sister and my parents, I’ve learned some things that really surprised me.

I’ll try to cleave to the facts. On June 19, 2010, my sister was driving in Baltimore when her car was struck by another car and she was killed. The other driver had run a red light and hit my sister as she crossed the intersection on the green light.

Now, I don’t discount the possibility that Katie was at fault in the accident, but it never really looked that way. The only witness who gave a statement on the day said that Katie had the light, etc. The totality of the evidence left some room for argument, but that will be the case any time there’s a catastrophic car accident that doesn’t happen underneath an array of video cameras.

One indication that the case was pretty open-and-shut was that the other guy’s insurance company looked at the situation and settled with my sister’s estate basically immediately. Now, because the other driver was underinsured, that payment didn’t amount to much, but my sister carried a policy with Progressive against the possibility of an accident with an underinsured driver. So Progressive was now on the hook for the difference between the other guy’s insurance and the value of Katie’s policy.

At which point we learned the first surprising thing about Progressive: Carrying Progressive insurance and getting into an accident does not entitle you to the value of your insurance policy. It just pisses off Progressive’s lawyers. Here I address you, Prospective Progressive Insurance Customer: someday when you have your accident, I promise that there will be enough wiggle room for Progressive’s bottomless stack of in-house attorneys to make a court case out of it and to hammer at that court case until you or your surviving loved ones run out of money.

Which is what Progressive decided to do to my family. In hopes that a jury would hang or decide that the accident was her fault, they refused to pay the policy to my sister’s estate.

Out of a sense of honor, and out of a sense of the cost of my sister’s outstanding student loans, my folks opted to try to go after the money through legal channels. At which point they learned another delightful thing. In Maryland, you may not sue an insurance company when they refuse to fork over your money. Instead, what they had to do was sue the guy who killed my sister, establish his negligence in court, and then leverage that decision to force Progressive to pay the policy.

Now my parents don’t harbor much venom for the guy who killed my sister. It was an accident, and kicking that guy around won’t bring Katie back. But kicking that guy around was the only way to get Progressive to pay. So they filed a civil suit against the other driver in hopes that, rather than going to court, Progressive would settle. Progressive did not. Progressive made a series of offers (never higher than 1/3 the amount they owe) and then let it go to a trial.

At the trial, the guy who killed my sister was defended by Progressive’s legal team.

If you are insured by Progressive, and they owe you money, they will defend your killer in court in order to not pay you your policy.

The trial was a real shitshow for my parents, and I did not love it either. As it happens, the jury did find that the other driver was negligent, which, if justice or decency are priorities for Progressive, will result in them finally honoring Katie’s policy. At this point, I hope you’ll forgive me if I wait for it to actually happen.

Don’t buy insurance from Progressive. Not only will you be paying the salaries of people who put my family through the wringer (really a smaller wringer that Progressive attached to the main wringer of my sister’s death), but also when the chips are down, your money will have bought you nothing but a kick in the face.

That post was dated August 13. In an update posted the next day he said:

Today, in response to my blog post entitled “My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer In Court,” Progressive released a statement saying that ”Progressive did not serve as the attorney for the defendant” in my sister’s case. I am not a lawyer, but this is what I observed in the courtroom during my sister’s trial:

At the beginning of the trial on Monday, August 6th, an attorney identified himself as Jeffrey R. Moffat and stated that he worked for Progressive Advanced Insurance Company. He then sat next to the defendant. During the trial, both in and out of the courtroom, he conferred with the defendant. He gave an opening statement to the jury, in which he proposed the idea that the defendant should not be found negligent in the case. He cross-examined the plaintiff’s witnesses. On direct examination, he questioned all of the defense’s witnesses. He made objections on behalf of the defendant, and he was a party to the argument of all of the objections heard in the case. After all of the witnesses had been called, he stood before the jury and gave a closing argument, in which he argued that my sister was responsible for the accident that killed her, and that the jury should not decide that the defendant was negligent.

I am comfortable characterizing this as a legal defense.

I wrote about this case on my blog because I felt that, in the wake of my sister’s death, Progressive had sought out ways to meet their strict legal obligation while still disrespecting my sister’s memory and causing my family a world of hurt. Their statement disavowing their role in this case, a case in which their attorney stood before my sister’s jury and argued on behalf of her killer, is simply infuriating.

I’ve never dealt with Progressive Insurance before, but I can guarantee that now they will never get any of my money.

I was saddened to learn tonight to learn tonight of the death of Dennis Ritchie – especially since he died last October and I’m just now hearing of it. It seems unjust that someone who contributed so much was never given the recognition he deserved. As a Linux user (Linux is based on UNIX) and Computer Science major I owe so much to this man, I hope someday I get to express my gratitude to him for all he has done.

I just read an interesting blog entry by Eric Raymond, one of the leaders of the open-source software movement. Now, before your eyes glaze over because you think this is going to be some boring nerd rant, take a look at the following quote:

Cisco could change the terms of its service to give it even more sweeping and arbitrary privileges at any time. Or Apple could do that, or Microsoft could. The power relationship remains dangerously asymmetrical; the closed source remains their instrument of control over you.

This is why you should demand open source in your router, open source in your operating system, and open source in any application software that is important to your life. Because if you don’t own it, it will surely own you.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Cisco owns Linksys, the most popular brand of home router.

This morning I deleted my Facebook account. I made sure to give my Facebook friends a few weeks notice so that I could get their contact info. I’d been thinking about deleting my account for a while. What made me decide to do it now is that in the last few weeks I noticed several changes for the worse. These changes made me think Facebook no longer places a high priority on the needs of their users, so I decided the time was right for me to leave.

I’ve always been a very private person. I don’t share a lot of information with people, and the information I do share I share very selectively. So the idea of any company selling my information to the highest bidder, or giving it freely to some third party is absolutely appalling to me. For a long time I wasn’t sure what to do about it. However, I’ve decided that I’m no longer going to give my business to any company who I know is giving my personal information to other entities, especially when they can’t even be bothered to tell me who those entities are. Facebook is going to be the hardest to leave because of the number of friends I have there. I hope that I don’t lose touch with any of my Facebook friends, but it’s a risk I believe I have to take.